Kugel on Biblical Interpretation by the Ancient Interpreters and Current Jewish and Christian Interpretation (5/23/21)

In the book forming the basis for the WPC series (Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently), the authors offer (pp. 24-25) Professor James’ Kugel’s “four principles of ancient Jewish exegesis.”  I thought I would offer just a little more on that from the Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.  Kugel says that these principles are “Four Assumptions” that ancient interpreters brought to interpreting the Hebrew Bible.

Kugel has a special expertise in interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (including Christian interpretations )of the Hebrew Bible and has placed particular focus on interpretations of the Hebrew Bible when the Jewish community canonized the text over many years.  He argues that the key interpretations were not what the original author(s) (or redactors) may have intended but the interpretations when the Jewish community accepted the text as interpreted as canon for their religion.  Thus, Song of Songs (Song of Solomon in the Christian Bible) is a love poem between woman and man.  By a process of interpretation, the Jewish community and then the Christian community made it about the love of God and community.  This interpretive process starts and then does not end.

Here is  how Kugel illustrates his focus on ancient interpreters (pp. 10-17, footnotes and endnotes omitted and bold-face supplied by JAT):

The Ancient Interpreters at Work

                        Who were the interpreters of these ancient writings? n14 For the most part, their names are unknown. From their writings and from their whole approach to interpreting Scripture, it would appear that most of them were teachers or professional sages of sorts; n15 is some were probably independently wealthy men (and, possibly, women) who had the leisure to pursue their subject. n16 Indeed, we know that a few, like the second-century BCE sage Ben Sira, belonged to the ruling class and were close to the political leadership (Sir. 39:4; 50:1-24); such figures no doubt strengthened the connection between reading Scripture and determining how community affairs were to be run in their own day. Their ideas about how Scripture is to be interpreted have survived in a number of texts belonging to the end of the biblical period—texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the biblical apocrypha and pseudepigraphas as well as in somewhat later writings such as those of early Christians and the founders of rabbinic Judaism.

[11]

            The manner in which ancient interpreters read and explained Scripture is at first likely to strike modern readers as a bit strange. They did not go about the job of interpreting the way we do nowadays. Take, for example, the famous biblical story of how God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar:

And it came to pass, after these things, that God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" and he answered, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. Then sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you." So Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took two of his servants with him, along with his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and then set out for the place that God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. Abraham told his servants, "You stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go up there, so that we can worship and then come back to you."

            Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together. But Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father?" and he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked together.

            When they came to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it. He then tied up his son Isaac and put him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son. But an angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not harm the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.

                                                                                    Gen. 22:1-13

            The story itself is quite disturbing to modern readers — as it was to ancient readers. How could God, even as a test, order someone to kill his own son? And why would God ever need to test Abraham in this way? After all, God is supposed to know everything: presumably, He knew how the test would come out before it took place, and He certainly already knew that Abraham was one who "feared God," as the angel says after the test is over. Equally disturbing is the way Abraham deceives his son Isaac. He does not tell him  [12] what God has told him to do; Isaac is kept in the dark until the last minute. In fact, when Isaac asks the obvious question—I see all the accoutrements for the sacrifice, but where is the animal we're going to sacrifice? — Abraham gives him an evasive answer: "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." This actually turns out to be true; God does provide a sacrificial animal — but Abraham had no way of knowing it at the time.

            Modern readers generally take these things at face value and then either wrestle with their implications or else just shrug their shoulders: "Well, I guess that's just the way things were back then." But ancient interpreters instead set out to give the text the most favorable reading they could and, in some cases, to try to get it to say what they thought it really meant to say, or at least ought to say. They did this by combining an extremely meticulous examination of its words with an interpretive freedom that sometimes bordered on the wildly inventive.

            Thus, in the case at hand, they noticed that the first sentence began, "And it came to pass, after these things." Such phrases are often used in the Bible to mark a transition; they generally signal a break, "The previous story is over and now we are going on to something new." But the word "things" in Hebrew also means "words." So the transitional phrase here could equally well be understood as asserting that some words had been spoken, and that "it came to pass, after these words, that God tested Abraham." What words? The Bible did not say, but if some words had indeed been spoken, then interpreters felt free to try to figure out what the words in question might have been.

            At this point, some ancient interpreter — we have no idea who — thought of another part of the Bible quite unrelated to Abraham, the book of Job. That book begins by reporting that Satan once challenged God to test His servant Job. Since the story of Abraham and Isaac is also a divine test, interpreters theorized that the words mentioned in the opening sentence of our passage might have been, as in the book of Job, a challenge spoken by Satan to God: "Put Abraham to the test and see whether he is indeed obedient enough even to sacrifice his own son." If one reads the opening sentence with this in mind, "And it came to pass, after these words, that God tested Abraham," then the problem of why God should have tested Abraham disappears. Of course God knew that Abraham would pass the test—but if He nevertheless went on to test Abraham, it was because some words had been spoken by Satan challenging God to prove Abraham's worthiness.

            As for Abraham hiding his intentions from Isaac—well, again it all depends how you read the text. Ancient interpreters noticed that the passage contains a slight repetition:

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together.  [13]  But Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father?" and he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them walked together.

            Repetition is not necessarily a bad thing, but ancient interpreters generally felt that the Bible would not repeat itself without purpose. Between the two occurrences of "and the two of them walked together" is the brief exchange in which Abraham apparently hides his true intentions from Isaac. But Abraham's words were, at least potentially, ambiguous. Since biblical Hebrew was originally written without punctuation marks or even capital letters marking the beginnings of sentences, Abraham's answer to Isaac could actually be read as two sentences: "God Himself will provide. The lamb for the burnt offering [is] my son." Read in this way, Abraham's answer to Isaac was not an evasion but the brutal truth: you're the sacrifice. If, following that, the text adds, "And the two of them walked together," this would not be a needless repetition at all: Abraham told Isaac that he was to be the sacrifice and Isaac agreed; then the two of them "walked together" in the sense that they were now of one mind to carry out God's fearsome command.

            By interpreting the story in this fashion, ancient interpreters solved two of the major problems raised by this account, God's apparent ignorance of how the test would turn out and Abraham's apparent callousness and evasiveness vis-a-vis Isaac. But did these interpreters actually believe their own interpretations? Didn't they know they were playing fast and loose with the text's real meaning?

            This is always a difficult question. I personally believe that, at least at first, ancient interpreters were sometimes quite well aware that they were distorting the straightforward meaning of the text. But with time, that awareness began to dim. Biblical interpretation soon became an institution in ancient Israel; one generation's interpretations were passed on to the next generation, and eventually they acquired the authority that time and tradition always grant. Midrash, as this body of interpretation came to be called, simply became what the text had always been intended to communicate. Along with the interpretations themselves, the interpreters' very modus operandi acquired its own authority: this was how the Bible was to be interpreted, period. Moreover, since the midrashic method of searching the text carefully for hidden implica- [14] tions seemed to solve so many problems in the Bible that otherwise had no solution, this indicated that the interpreters were going about things correctly. As time went on, new interpretations were created on the model of older ones, until soon every chapter of the Bible came accompanied by a host of clever explanations that accounted for any perceived difficulty in its words.

The Four Assumptions

            Readers always approach texts with certain assumptions, and the assumptions change depending on what they are reading; not every text is thought to mean in the same way. Thus, when we read a poem in which the poet says to his beloved, "I faint! I die!" we know he's not really dying; likewise, when he says he's wallowing in love in the same way that a cooked fish is wallowed in galantine sauce, well . . . we know this isn't really intended as an exact description of his emotional state. And it is not just poems. Novels and short stories, form letters and radio commercials and last wills and testaments—all sorts of different compositions come with their own conventions, and we as readers are aware of those conventions and interpret the texts accordingly. We expect to be amused by a stand-up comedian's recitation of his woes, and so we laugh in all the right places; yet if a somewhat similar monologue is spoken by a patient at his group therapy session, people will probably not laugh, in part because they bring an entirely different set of expectations to his "text." (Also, they don't want to hurt his feelings.)

            It is a striking fact that all ancient interpreters seem to have shared very much the same set of expectations about the biblical text. No one ever sat down and formulated these assumptions for them—they were simply assumed, just like our present-day assumptions about how we are to understand texts uttered by poets and group-therapy patients. However, looking over the vast body of ancient interpretations of different parts of the Bible, we can gain a rather clear picture of what their authors were assuming about the biblical text—and what emerges is that, despite the geographic and cultural distance separating some of these interpreters from others, they all seem to have assumed the same four basic things about how the Bible was to be read:

            1.         They assumed that the Bible was a fundamentally cryptic text: that is, when it said A, often it might really mean B. Thus, when it said, "And it came to pass after these things," even though that might look like the familiar transitional phrase, what it might really mean was "after these words." Indeed, this text, they felt, was so cryptic that it did not even say what the words were—it had left it to the interpreters themselves to remember the book of Job and so figure out the rest. Similarly, when the Bible repeated "and the two of them walked together,"  [15]  the second occurrence of this phrase had a hidden meaning: Abraham and Isaac had agreed and now proceeded as if of one mind.

            2.         Interpreters also assumed that the Bible was a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day. It may seem to talk about the past, but it is not fundamentally history. It is instruction, telling us what to do: be obedient to God just as Abraham was and you will be rewarded, just as he was. Ancient interpreters assumed this not only about narratives like the Abraham story but about every part of the Bible. For example, Isaiah's prophecies about the Assyrian crisis contained, interpreters believed, a message for people in their own time (five or six centuries later). Likewise, when the book of Nahum had referred metaphorically to a "raging lion," the text was not talking about some enemy in Nahum's own day, but about Demetrius III, who was the king of Syria six hundred years later, in the time of the ancient interpreters. n17 Similarly, the Bible's laws were understood as being intended for people to obey in the interpreters' own time, even though they had been promulgated in a very different society many centuries earlier.

            3.         Interpreters also assumed that the Bible contained no contradictions or mistakes. It is perfectly harmonious, despite its being an anthology; in fact, they also believed that everything that the Bible says ought to be in accord with the interpreters' own religious beliefs and practices (since they believed these to have been ordained by God). Thus, if the Bible seemed to imply that God was not all-knowing or that Abraham had been callous and deceitful with his son, interpreters would not say that this story reflected beliefs about God or basic morality that had changed since ancient times. Instead, they stoutly insisted that there must be some way of understanding the Bible's words so as to remove any such implications: that cannot be what the Bible really intended! And of course the Bible ought not to contradict itself or even seem to repeat itself needlessly, so that if it said "and the two of them walked together" twice, the second occurrence cannot be merely repetitive; it must mean something different from the first. In short, the Bible, they felt, is an utterly consistent, seamless, perfect book.

            4.         Lastly, they believed that the entire Bible is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directly or through His prophets. There could be little doubt about those parts of the Bible that openly identify the speaker as God: "And the LORD spoke to Moses, say-  [16]    ing . . ." "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel . ." But interpreters believed that this was also true of the story of Abraham and the other stories in Genesis, even though the text itself never actually said there that God was the author of these stories. And it was held to be true of the rest of the Bible too—even of the book of Psalms, although the psalms themselves are prayers and songs addressed to God and thus ought logically not to have come from God. Nevertheless, most interpreters held the psalms to be in some sense of divine origin, written under divine inspiration or guidance or even directly dictated to David, their traditional author. n18

            How these assumptions came into existence is hard to say for sure, and in any case that question need not detain us here;  n19 the fact is, they did come into existence, even before Israel's ancient library of sacred texts began to be called the Bible, in fact, even before its precise table of contents had been determined.

            What are modern readers to make of these assumptions? Many readers will balk at the ancient interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story given above, indeed, at many of the interpretations mentioned in this book. But it is simply in the nature of assumptions in general that they are assumed, not consciously adopted. Once biblical interpretation had started along the path of these Four Assumptions, it developed a logic, and a momentum, of its own. This was simply how the Bible was to be understood. The power and persuasiveness of these assumptions may be clearer if one considers that, to a remarkable degree, they continue to color the way people read the Bible right down to the present day (even if nowadays they may lead to somewhat different conclusions from those advanced by the ancient interpreters). Thus, many modern-day Jews and Christians continue to look to the Bible as a guidebook for daily life (Assumption 2); they do not read it as if it were just a relic from the ancient past. In fact, a significant number of contemporary Jews and Christians seek to act on a daily basis in accordance with the Bible's specific exhortations and laws, and many view the Bible's prophecies as being fulfilled in the events of today's world (another aspect of Assumption 2). Without quite saying so, quite a few readers also generally assume that the Bible has some sort of coherent message to communicate and that it does not contradict itself or contain mistakes (Assumption 3). Many also believe that the Bible's meaning is not always obvious (Assumption 1)—it even seems deliberately cryptic sometimes, they say. And the idea of divine inspiration, in fact, the conception of the Bible as a whole as the word of God (Assumption 4), is an article of faith in a great many denominations.

            Thus, whatever one thinks of the Four Assumptions, there is no denying their staying power. What is more, some of the interpretations they gave rise to have demonstrated a comparable durability: to a degree not generally recognized, these interpretations are still with us and have actually succeeded in  [17]  changing the meaning of quite a few biblical stories. As will be seen presently, the story of Adam and Eve only became "the Fall of Man" thanks to these ancient interpretive assumptions; the book of Genesis says nothing of the kind. The same is true of many other things that people have always believed the Bible says—that Abraham was the one who discovered that there is only one God, that David was a pious king who wrote the book of Psalms, or that the Song of Solomon speaks of God's love for His people. The Bible says these things only if it is read in accordance with the Four Assumptions. That is why, even today, trampling on these assumptions can get people's hackles up— Charles A. Briggs was neither the first nor the last modern scholar to learn that lesson.